Ray-tracing comes to Minecraft on Series X|S

One of the first games to take advantage of hardware accelerated ray-tracing on PC was Minecraft, transforming the simple blocky world into a visually accurate graphical showpiece. This ray tracing update is now coming to Xbox Series X|S owners.

As reported by The Verge’s Tom Warren, Minecraft’s latest Preview update has added native support for the Xbox Series X|S – as can be identified by the game icon now having the next-gen systems’ logo plastered on the front.

Minecraft with raytracing on Xbox? The latest Minecraft Preview is optimized for Xbox Series S / X and has early raytracing support 👀 pic.twitter.com/cqH0cuGbtS

— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) March 28, 2022

Currently, the exact details of this update are unknown, however the one major and immediately noticeable improvement comes in the form of ray-tracing being applied to the game.

Despite still being in preview, the ray tracing appears to be fully implemented, offering a major visual improvement to Minecraft without the addition of texture packs or 3rd-party shaders.

As with many of Minecraft’s other settings, the game’s ray tracing draw distance can be adjusted, leading to a scalable and user-adjustable experience. It will be interesting to see what performance looks like, and whether PS5 owners will eventually see this update.

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KitGuru says: What do you think of the update? Have you tried ray-traced Minecraft? Is it worth the performance cost compared to other shaders? Let us know down below.

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